


redux

by thedevilchicken



Category: DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Codependency, Fights, Guilt, M/M, Pseudo-Incest, Resurrection, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 07:45:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8363839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: "You always were a shitty father, Bruce," Jason tells him, grinning.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



When Jason came back, it was the worst possible time. Not that Bruce can think of any time that would've been good for unexpected, unanticipated resurrection. 

He was in the middle of a case, some low-class, high-bankroll scum trafficking girls from China with automatic weapons on the side; the Gotham PD cared more about the guns than the girls, which said more about their priorities than Bruce liked to consider. And then, in the middle of it, there was the guy in the red hood who screwed up the case as he tried to kill him. 

The way he fought was so familiar it kept Bruce awake at night, not that he ever slept a whole night through, but he just couldn't place it. And then, one night, on a rooftop alone, the mask came off and there was Jason. 

"Surprise," Jason said. 

"You're dead," Bruce replied. 

"Do I look dead?" Jason turned a quick circle. He did not, in fact, look dead. 

"You were." 

"Now I'm back." 

"I don't believe you."

"I don't care." 

But Bruce believed him. When they fought, Bruce believed him, in a metaphorical punch to the gut that was followed by a more literal one. They fought, though Bruce's heart just wasn't in it. Jason cursed at him, screamed at him, yelled until his voice was raw, told him to fight or he'd kill him. Bruce fell to his knees. Jason drew a gun and he put it to his head. 

"You were like a father to me," Jason said. "And you let me go, just like that." 

"You were like a son to me," Bruce replied. "I almost killed him when he killed you."

"But you didn't." 

"No."

"I wish you had. That would have meant something."

Jason didn't pull the trigger; he cold-cocked Bruce unconscious with the gun and left him there instead. Bruce didn't think he'd see him again, and half suspected he'd imagined the whole thing. It would have been better if he had.

-

"Leave me alone," Jason said, three weeks later, and he flinched away. 

"You're bleeding," Bruce said, matter-of-fact, because he was. Blood was soaking Jason's sleeve and dripping to the ground from the angle of his wrist, and maybe Bruce had seen worse but he'd also seen far better. "You need stitches." He prodded at the wound experimentally and made Jason hiss out loud. "Five or six of them."

"So I'll go home and I'll do it myself." 

Bruce frowned, at least in part because he was unsure that Jason had a home. He fetched a fresh suture kit from the steel-fronted cupboard across the room and set it on a tray by the table where Jason was sitting, legs dangling in air. Jason was taller than he had been the day he'd died. He was older. He was bulkier. Jason was a man and not the boy who'd died, but it was still him beneath it. 

"You _are_ home," Bruce said. Jason scowled, but he let him sew him up. 

He didn't leave the cave for three days. On the fourth day, he disappeared again.

-

Weeks passed. Three months passed. Bruce searched for him, so did Barbara, so did Dick, and they found nothing except the facts they knew already: Jason Todd was dead. 

And then, one night, in an alley in a midnight cloudburst, rain running slick all over Bruce's suit, there was Jason Todd. He wasn't dead at all.

"I don't want to fight you, Jason," Bruce said, though the modulator in his suit made his voice sound dark and harsh. 

"You don't have to fight me, Bruce," Jason replied. "You can just stand there if you like. I don't really care." 

Bruce let him beat him to his knees. He felt his lip split. He felt a rib break. He would have let him keep on going till he was nothing but a bloody pulp, a stain washed away by the rain in a dirty Gotham alley, but Jason sobbed. He gulped a breath and he _sobbed_ and doubled over and he fell down on his knees, his masked face pressed hard against Bruce's suited shoulder. 

"I hate you," Jason said. "He killed me and you let him live." 

Bruce wrapped his arms around him. Jason only flinched for the first second. 

"It wouldn't have brought you back," Bruce said. 

"If it'd been Dick, you'd've done it." 

Bruce didn't reply. He wasn't sure what hurt more: knowing that was what Jason believed, or knowing it was true. He still can't fathom how to make amends, but he's still trying.

-

The cave alarm sounded nine days later. The cameras showed Jason sitting there on the hood of the car. He could have bypassed the alarms but hadn't; Bruce understood that he'd meant to be seen. When he returned from patrol an hour later, Jason was still there. 

"So, that makes two of us you've buried alive," Jason said, as they watched Superman saving climbers from a rockslide on the cave's computer's towering screen. 

"There's a difference," Bruce said, and he took a sidelong glance before he turned back to the screen, full up of red cape and cheering. No one ever cheered for Batman. No one cheered for Red Hood. 

"Oh yeah?" Jason said. 

"Yes," Bruce confirmed. 

"You gonna tell me what the difference is or do I have to guess?"

Bruce winced under his cowl.

"You weren't alive," he said.

"I am now." 

"So it seems." 

"Do I need to convince you?"

They did tests. Jason let him take his blood, and Bruce had to admit he'd had samples from the suturing, and had to admit he hadn't tested them although he'd known he should. Jason let him take a tissue sample, hair, let him x-ray him, everything they could have done down in the cave. 

"I'm me," Jason said, as he left before dawn. "You'll see." 

And he was, but Bruce still doesn't know how that can be. Jason doesn't, either. He doesn't remember at all.

-

The next time Jason visited, Bruce told him he abhorred his new methods. Jason told him to go fuck himself and left again. 

The next time Jason visited, Bruce asked him how he'd come back from the dead. Jason told him had not the slightest clue, and left again. 

The next time Jason visited, Bruce wasn't there. Jason stayed for three days and made pancakes with Alfred. When Bruce returned, he was gone again. 

The next time Jason visited, Bruce didn't say a word at all. Jason was filthy, like he'd been living homeless on the streets and maybe he had been. When he took off his clothes, he was scarred underneath. Bruce remembered some of them. It was the ones he didn't know that made him sick. 

The next time, Bruce told Jason he could stay. Jason laughed and then he left again. The next time, Bruce asked him if he'd stay. Jason laughed out loud and then he left _again_. The next time, Bruce didn't ask. Jason took the guest room. He stayed there a full week. 

-

Eight months after his return, Bruce found Jason in an alley before dawn. He wasn't wearing the red hood. He was bloody. Whatever fight he'd had, he'd lost. 

Bruce took him to the lake house, in the passenger side of the car that was fifteen evolutions on from the one Jason had known when he'd been living, or maybe more. He took off his own suit and took him upstairs into the house and Jason let him do it. Jason let him take off his bloody clothes and wash his cuts and test his bruises with his fingertips, though it made him wince. Bruce knew the pattern: he'd taken a fall off of a fire escape. 

He lent him clothes to sleep in, sweatpants and an undershirt, tried not to let his fingers linger on Jason's new complement of scars. He took him to the guest room and Jason frowned at him in the doorway. Twenty minutes later, Jason was in Bruce's doorway instead. 

Neither of them said a word as Jason turned back the sheets and joined him in the dark. The only sound was their breath as Jason's arm went tentatively across Bruce's chest. Sometimes Bruce still feels like he doesn't know the man Jason is in the slightest; that night, it was like he had his Robin back again.

-

Eleven months, and they started sparring. 

Jason started with Dick, when they thought Bruce wasn't there and couldn't see, or maybe they knew he was at the far side of the cameras. They began unarmed, hand-to-hand, and Bruce thought maybe Jason's new bulk had slowed him down and his technique had suffered. He guessed being dead might do that to a person, but Dick had always been an excellent teacher. And maybe he and Jason hadn't always seen eye to eye before, maybe they still didn't, but somehow they were very much still brothers. 

Jason trained in the cave while Bruce wasn't there, using his weights, his equipment, his shower, his towels. And then, thirteen months, Bruce joined him. 

They fought. In the gym, on the training mats, not fighting to kill in an alley or a Gotham rooftop, Bruce had the advantage and they both knew it. Bruce hit him square in the jaw and Jason snarled, he threw himself at him, knocked Bruce from his feet though when they landed Bruce had switched their positions mid-air. All the wind went out of Jason in a huff and Bruce held him down, expertly, a trick that Jason had never had the patience to learn. He had newer skills Bruce hadn't expected, but some things were still the same. 

Jason looked at him, his jaw red and Bruce knew that spot would bruise by morning. Jason looked at him, his eyes hard, his jaw set, his chest heaving as he fought to catch his breath, and then the look on Jason's face began to change as they lay there pressed together. It didn't really soften, it just turned dark and scared and desperate and Jason's breath caught and his eyes squeezed shut. When Bruce let him up, he expected a fist to connect with his cheekbone or maybe his gut, and that time he would have let him. When Bruce let him up, Jason wrapped his arms around him and squeezed so tight that Bruce could barely breathe. The contact was electric. Bruce felt sick. He hugged him back.

When Jason kissed him, he didn't push him back although he knew he should have - he told himself he was too surprised, though that was plainly so much bullshit. And later, when Jason joined him in his bed in the pre-dawn dark, Bruce knew he should have sent him back to his room but again, he didn't. When Jason's hand pushed down under the waist of Bruce's silk pyjamas, he didn't tell him no; instead he told himself this man Jason in his bed wasn't the same boy he'd known who'd died. When Jason sucked his cock until he came, he told himself it wasn't wrong. 

"I missed you," Jason said into the dark, when he was finished. 

It was wrong.

-

Jason slept in Bruce's bed the next night and the next, then disappeared again. Bruce didn't try to find him. He knew from experience that he'd just have to wait. 

He was gone for three weeks, and Bruce felt better in that time, and worse. When Jason returned, turned back up in the house helping Alfred with dinner, Bruce felt worse, and better. 

He didn't ask Jason to go with him on patrol, but he had no idea how he should stop him when he tagged along or if he even wanted to try. Jason shot a man in the neck that night, the head of the trafficking ring who'd gotten away that first night he'd come back to Gotham, and Jason grinned while that man bled out on the pavement under Bruce's blood-slick gloved hands. They left before the police arrived. And when they got back to the cave, Bruce threw up everything they'd had for dinner. 

"I don't understand," Jason said, as Bruce gargled mouthwash. 

Bruce nodded tightly, spat, and then they went upstairs to bed. 

Jason was naked by the time they reached Bruce's bed, behind closed doors, and Bruce didn't object, not even when Jason set about undressing him, too. 

When they were bare under the sheets, Jason settled over him and Bruce didn't object to that, not for a second - his hands skimmed Jason's hips and he pushed the blood right out of his mind. As Jason pressed his mouth to his neck, stubble scraping at his skin, he didn't think of the blood swirling in the shower drain. When Jason reached to the drawer by the bed for the lube Bruce kept there just in case, as his rough fingers slicked his hole, teased him, made him pull hard at the bars in his headboard, he didn't think of blood pooling on the asphalt, steaming in the winter air. When Jason pushed up into him, he wasn't thinking of anyone Jason had killed at all. 

At least he tried not to.

-

It's been two years. 

"You always were a shitty father, Bruce," Jason tells him, grinning, thinking that he's teasing, when he pulls out from inside him once he's come. The words are like a knife that he shoves in and twists, not that Bruce can find the words to say that's what it is. 

Jason always makes sure Bruce comes first, while he's in him, so he goes taut and tight and gasps and loses his control. Bruce lets him do it, though he knows he doesn't have to, but Jason seems so pleased by it. Then again, sometimes what Jason wants is something else and so Bruce has him instead, on their knees, his chest pressed up to Jason's back, his hand at Jason's cock. He comes in him, his free hand pressed over Jason's heart; he gives himself up to the sex night by night and he tells himself it's because he's still just so relieved that Jason's there, that he's not dead after all, and so he'll give him what he wants. That's easier to believe than the simple fact that he wants it, too.

He should turn him in, and he knows it, but he won't. He should make him stop at any cost, and he knows it, but he won't. There's a cell in Arkham that could maybe hold him, but Bruce won't send him there. All he can do is keep it quiet, keep the secret and hope it never happens again, but he suspects it will. He remembers the bitter look of triumph on Jason's face when he took off the mask when that man was dead, and he _knows_ it will. He's not even sure if he'll be disappointed when it does. Jason will have proved him right. It's not much of a consolation. 

Jason turns off the lamp by the bed and they settle together in the dark, side by side. Sometimes Jason dreams the same way Bruce does and Bruce has to wake him out of it, though Jason's struck out at him for it more than once. They don't talk about it, but Bruce thinks in his dreams it's the night he came back, his coffin, his grave, the cemetery where they buried him. Bruce used to visit. Now he doesn't have to.

He missed him when he was gone. It tore at him. It changed him. Now, he's back. 

Jason is his ally, his nemesis. He's his lover and his son. Jason is dead. Jason is living. Jason is the steady hand that stitches up his wounds. Jason is a killer. 

He doesn't know if he'll ever be able to trust him again, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to.


End file.
